Expert: Maria - 7/21/2008

Question
Hi. I wanted to know if anyone could translate "The forbidden fruit tastes the sweetest" into Latin?
I wanted to get it engraved on a necklace in ancient Latin lettering. (So if you know how to write it in ancient Latin, that would be even better.)

Thanks in advance. =)
-Sarah

Answer
Hello,

“The forbidden fruit tastes the sweetest“ translates into classical Latin as:“Dulcissime prohibitum sapit pomum”.

Anyway in Archaic Latin, i.e. the oldest recorded Latin dating back at early as the 6th century BC., this phrase  would have been written in capital letters as follows:
DVLCISSIME PROHIBITVM SAPIT POMVM.

As you can see, the lower case “u” is written V in capital letters just because the capital U first appears only in the later 1st. century AD.
Moreover in Archaic Latin the Romans would not have put spaces between the words and then the phrase would have written as follows:
DVLCISSIMEPROHIBITVMSAPITPOMVM.

Best regards,
Maria
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GRAMMATICAL ANALYSIS

-The forbidden = prohibitum / PROHIBITVM (past participle of PROHIBEO, I forbid)

-fruit = pomum / POMVM (nominative neuter, 2nd.declension)

-tastes = sapit / SAPIT (from SAPIO)

-the sweetest =dulcissime /DVLCISSIME (adverb in the superlative)

Latin word order can be different from English, as you can see.
This because Latin is an inflected language where syntactical relationships are indicated by the endings, not by the order of the words.
This is why the above phrase can be written also as follows:
-POMVM PROHIBITVM DVLCISSIME SAPIT (capital letters)
-Pomum prohibitum dulcissime sapit (lower case letters)
-POMVMPROHIBITVMDVLCISSIMESAPIT (capital letters without spaces between the words ).

Finally I really hope this phrase is for a necklace,as you say,  NOT for a tattoo!